As part of the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) within the GSFC Heliophysics Science Division, the Space Weather Research Center (SWRC) is tasked to provide space weather services to NASA’s robotic missions. This proposed effort directly addresses the needs of current NASA missions in dealing with the potential negative effects of space weather on our spacecraft in near real-time.

Knowlege gained from this proposed effort will directly benefit all current and future NASA missions. This effort will enable us to correlate space environment information with spacecraft anomaly data, therefore advancing our understanding of the effects of space weather on spacecraft and specific technology systems. Investigating and eventually understanding these effects are essential for NASA since one of our nation’s next steps in space is to be able to send humans to Mars by 2030.

Other trending systems used and built by the commerical space industry can benefit from using a common interface to obtain space weather events information automously.

The “Space Weather in Operations” effort will provide on-demand and near-real time space weather event information to the Data Access Toolkit (DAT), which is the next generation trending system for NASA missions. The types of space weather events that will be identified and made available in the system include solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and solar energetic particles.

It is imperative that Mission Operations Teams (MOTs) have access to information that is pertinent to the safety of their satellites. Space environment information, particularly phenomena that is elevated to the level of "event" status, is information that should be readily available to all MOTs - allowing them to be better equipped to protect NASA assets in space.